According to a Professor Greg Whyte, writing in the Independent, when it comes to obesity, we’ve got an unhealthy obsession with diet. There is – Clearly weight is, to a first approximation, a matter of calories in (diet) vs. calories out (physical activity). For any given diet, whether you lose or gain weight is determined by how much exercise you do, and vice versa. There’s no such thing as “overeating” as such, there’s just eating out of proportion to your level of exercise.
But have we forgotten that? Do we talk about the diet side of the equation more? I ran a few searches on PubMed and Google for “obesity” + various other terms to try and find out and it looks like Whyte is right.
See the graph above.
There does seem to be an imbalance, with “food” and “diet” being much more popular than “exercise” and “physical activity”, both in terms of the scientific literature (PubMed), and more generally (Google). This is just a quick analysis of course, but it does suggest that when it comes to weight and obesity, we are more interested in calories in, than calories out.
I wonder why?
